Welcome to a year in the Bible with Daily Grace. The Bible tells one big story of redemption,

and we want to spend five minutes every day journeying through the Bible from start to

finish and exploring how all of it points to Jesus.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the a year in the Bible with Daily Grace podcast. My name

is Kristen and for the past few days, we have been working through the book of numbers.

And today, we pick up with numbers 31 through 33. And as we start in chapter 31, we see

that God tells Moses to avenge the Israelites by going to war with the people of Midian.

And so 12,000 Israelites went out to battle and they killed the kings of Midian and all

the men. But the Israelites allowed the Midianite women and the children to live. In Moses,

he found out about this and he was angry with the men and he forced them to kill all the

young boys or women that had been with the man, but they let the young girls live.

And so first of all, before we go any further, let's just admit that these chapters are hard.

It's hard to hear about massive killings and to know that many have used chapters like

these to abuse their power and to go on massive killing sprees. And so let it be said, this

is not the way that God works now. He does not want us to go on massive crusades, killing

our enemies and removing all the bad influences in the world by the sword. And Jesus told

us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. But as we read these chapters,

we must also remember that just a few chapters before when the people of Midian led the Israelites

to worship other gods and a great plague came over the people. The divine judgment of the

Midianites was from the Lord, definitely not one that we are called to emulate today. And after

the battle was over, the people of Rubin and Gad saw that the land looked nice. They thought,

hey, I want a mind living here. And so they asked Moses if they could call this land their own.

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